LORD FISHER
_"Look for a tough wedge for a tough log."_
PUBLIUS SYRUS.
No man I have met ever gave me so authentic a feeling of originality as
this dare-devil of genius, this pirate of public life, who more than any
other Englishman saved British democracy from a Prussian domination.
It is possible to regard him as a very simple soul mastered by one
tremendous purpose and by that purpose exalted to a most valid
greatness. If this purpose be kept steadily in mind, one may indeed see
in Lord Fisher something quite childlike. At any rate it is only when
the overmastering purpose is forgotten that he can be seen with the eyes
of his enemies, that is to say as a monster, a scoundrel, and an
imbecile.
He was asked on one occasion if he had been a little unscrupulous in
getting his way at the Admiralty. He replied that if his own brother had
got in front of him when he was trying to do something for England he
would have knocked that brother down and walked over his body.
Here is a man, let us be quite certain, of a most unusual force, a man
conscious in himself of powers greater than the kindest could discern in
his contemporaries, a man possessed by a dæmon of inspiration.
Fortunately for England this dæmon drove him in one single direction: he
sought the safety, honour, and glory of Great Britain. If his
contemporaries had been travelling whole-heartedly in the same direction
I have no doubt that he might have figured in the annals of the
Admiralty as something of a saint. But unhappily many of his associates
were not so furiously driven in this direction, and finding his urgings
inconvenient and vexatious they resisted him to the point of
exasperation: then came the struggle, and, the strong man winning, the
weaker went off to abuse him, and not only to abuse him, but to vilify
him and to plot against him, and lay many snares for his feet. He will
never now be numbered among the saints, but, happily for us, he was not
destined to be found among the martyrs.
He has said that in the darkest hours of his struggle he had no one to
support him save King Edward. Society was against him; half the
Admiralty was crying for his blood; the politicians wavered from one
side to the other; only the King stood fast and bade him go on with a
good heart. When he emerged from this tremendous struggle his hands may
not have been as clean as the angels could have wished; but the British
Navy was no longer scattered over the pleasant waters of the earth, was
no longer thinking chiefly of its paint and brass, was no longer a
pretty sight from Mediterranean or Pacific shores--it was almost the
dirtiest thing to be seen in the North Sea, and quite the deadliest
thing in the whole world as regards gunnery.
This was Lord Fisher's superb service. He foresaw and he prepared. Not
merely the form of the Fleet was revolutionized under his hand, but its
spirit. The British Navy was baptized into a new birth with the pea-soup
of the North Sea.
When this great work was accomplished he ordered a ship to be built
which should put the Kiel Canal out of business for many years. That
done, and while the Germans were spending the marks which otherwise
would have built warships in widening and deepening this channel to the
North Sea, Lord Fisher wrote it down that war with Germany would come in
1914, and that Captain Jellicoe would be England's Nelson.
From that moment he lost something of the hard and almost brutal
expression which had given so formidable a character to his face. He
gave rein to his natural humour. He let himself go; quoted more freely
from the Bible, asserted more positively that the English people are the
lost tribes of Israel, and waited for Armageddon with a humorous eye on
the perturbed face of Admiral Tirpitz.
In July, 1914, he was out of office. A telegram came to him from Mr.
Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, requesting to see him
urgently. Lord Fisher refused to see him, believing that Mr. Churchill
had jockeyed Mr. Reginald McKenna out of the Admiralty--Mr. McKenna who
had most bravely, nay heroically, stood by the naval estimates in face
of strong Cabinet opposition. On this ground he refused to meet Mr.
Churchill. But a telegram from Mr. McKenna followed, urging him to grant
this interview, and the meeting took place, a private meeting away from
London. Mr. Churchill informed Lord Fisher of the facts of the European
situation, and asked him for advice. The facts were sufficient to
convince Lord Fisher that the tug-o'-war between Germany and England had
begun. He told Mr. Churchill that he must do three things, and do them
all by telegram before he left that room: he must mobilize the Fleet, he
must buy the Dreadnoughts building for Turkey, and he must appoint
Admiral Jellicoe Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet. To do either of
the first two was a serious breach of Cabinet discipline; to do the last
was to offend a string of Admirals senior to Admiral Jellicoe. Mr.
Churchill hesitated. Lord Fisher insisted. "What does it matter," he
said, "whom you offend?--the fate of England depends on you. Does it
matter if they shoot you, or hang you, or send you to the Tower, so long
as England is saved?" And Mr. Churchill did as he was bidden--the
greatest act in his life, and perhaps one of the most courageous acts in
the history of statesmanship. Lord Fisher said afterwards, "You may not
like Winston, but he has got the heart of a lion."
Thus was England saved, and Germany doomed. Before war was declared the
British Fleet held the seas, and in command of that Fleet was the
quickest working brain in the Navy.
On one occasion, during the dark days of the war, I was lunching at the
Admiralty with Lord Fisher, who had then been recalled to office. He
appeared rather dismal, and to divert him I said, "I've got some good
news for you--we are perfectly safe and Germany is beaten." He looked up
from his plate and regarded me with lugubrious eyes. I then told him
that Lord Kitchener had been down at Knole with the Sackvilles and had
spent a whole day in taking blotting-paper impressions of the beautiful
mouldings of the doors for his house at Broome. "Does that make you feel
safe?" he demanded; and then, pointing to a maidservant at the
sideboard, he added, "See that parlourmaid?--well, she's leaving;
yesterday I spent two hours at Mrs. Hunt's registry office interviewing
parlourmaids. Now, do you feel safe?"
His return to the Admiralty brought him no happiness--save when he sent
Admiral Sturdee to sea to avenge the death of Admiral Cradock. He was
perhaps too insistent on victory, a crushing and overwhelming victory,
for a Fleet on which hung the whole safety of the Allies, and a Fleet
which had experienced the deadly power of the submarine. He was
certainly not too old for work. To the last, looking as if he was bowed
down to the point of exhaustion by his labours, he outworked all his
subordinates. As for energy, he would have hanged I know not how many
admirals if he had been in power during the last stages of the war.
His experience of Downing Street filled him up to the brim with contempt
for politicians. It was not so much their want of brains that troubled
him, but their total lack of character. Only here and there did he come
across a man who had the properties of leadership in even a minor
degree: for the most part they had no eyes for the horizon or for the
hills whence cometh man's salvation; they were all ears, and those ears
were leaned to the ground to catch the rumbles of political emergencies.
To find men at the head of so great a nation with no courage in the
heart, with no exaltation of captaincy in the soul, without even the
decency to make sacrifices for principle, made him bitterly
contemptuous. At first he could scarcely bridle his rage, but as years
went on he used to say that the politicians had deepened his faith in
Providence. God was surely looking after England or she would have
perished years agone. In his old age he ceaselessly quoted the lines of
William Watson:
"Time, and the Ocean, and some fostering star
In high cabal have made us what we are";
and damned the politician with all the vigour of the Old Testament
vernacular.
I have often listened to a minister's confidential gossip about Lord
Fisher; nothing in these interesting confidences struck me so much as
the self-satisfaction of the little minister in treating the man of
destiny as an amusing lunatic.
MR. ASQUITH
THE RT. HON. HERBERT HENRY ASQUITH
Born at Morley, Yorkshire, 1852. Educ.: City of London School;
Balliol College, Oxford; gained 1st class, Lit. Hum. 1874;
Barrister Lincoln's Inn, 1876; Q. C. 1890; Home Sec'y, 1892-95;
Ecclesiastical Commissioner, 1892-95; Chancellor of the Exchequer,
1905-8; Sec'y for War, 1914; 1st Lord of the Treasury and Prime
Minister, 1908-16; LL.D. Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cambridge, Leeds, St.
Andrews, and Bristol.
[Illustration: RT. HON. HERBERT HENRY ASQUITH]